My Doctor Aggravates Me Every Healthcare Visit.

You know it! I do too. Doctors can have a bad day, act grumpy, snap back at you, and even intimidate you verbally. But it's doubtful that the rare sudden burst of unacceptable attitude or verbal comments would drive you away. Here we're discussing the repetitive occurrence of offensive happenings in the doctor's office that do cause patients to change doctors.

The critical issue here is one of ---- are you receiving proper and good medical care while these issues are going on?
To be blunt.....NO! You may notice several subtle clues, some not so subtle, which tell you things aren't going to get any better.
• If the doctor upsets you, you won't trust him or her.
• If you don't trust the doctor, you won't follow medical advice.
• If you don't follow advice and take the medications your health suffers.
• Someone in the office repeatedly treats you terrible for some reason.
• Office personnel are always forgetting something you need to have done.
• Doctor repeatedly cuts you off in the middle of your comments.
• Lack of appropriate follow-up on your health problems.

Doctor's are trained to treat patients with dignity, always be kind, don't get angry, don't pass your personal problems on to the patient. That's the essence of "rapport" with your doctor.
Solution: Letting the problem go on and on is never the answer. Direct confrontation of the doctor or office person is how you find out whether you need to find another doctor. Of course, if you have no motivation to stick with your doctor and resolve things, you just change doctors quietly later.

Because a doctor has professional obligations to you, almost 90% of the time a confrontation works quite well. The dissatisfaction issues are brought out in the open and usually you will see the doctor, or healthcare provider, quickly give-in to your demands and agree to do better. The reason for that is, doctor's want all their patients to like them. Trouble is, it doesn't last long.

However, you will often find as time passes and the doctor has seen a few hundred patients since your last visit, old promises and agreements with you are forgotten and things drift back to the old disturbing problems again.
It's always considerably easier to move to a new doctor when you realize you have a bad first impression on your first visit. Trust your instincts. Doctor's often get the same impressions about you. The difficulty is, doctor's assume they have the character or personality to overcome any bad impressions with time. But it may not work out as expected. You, however, have no obligation to adapt to the doctor's faults. Don't try.

When you plain don't like the doctor.......change to another right then.

Another side to the problems:

Personality clashes are real. Doctors and patients become complacent about how they interrelate with others. And once a person realizes that all the solutions in the world will not bull-doze anyone out of a personality pattern they have developed for years, it's smart to stay away from each other.
Call it......"It's just the way they are."

Trying to hang in there and make such a relationship work well is a complete waste of time and mental energy. Looking at it from another point of view, there are a lot of doctors out there who will match your personality quite well.......why not change to a new doctor and enjoy better rapport with your doctor without having to constantly work at it as you had been doing with the old doctor.

The case of an office staffer harassing you:

I learned about this the hard way and nearly got kicked out of my residency training program. It went like this. The secretary to the head of our department (who ran the residency program) was repeatedly giving me orders to do certain things I was sure the boss never told her. I blew up at her with both barrels one day. The head of the program came to me and we discussed the event.

At the end of the conversation he said to me, "Barb, the secretary, has been with me for 18 years and knows how to take a work load off my shoulders. I want you to know that it is a lot easier for me to replace you than it is for me to replace her."

The solution to managing a bad acting office staff member is to discuss it directly with the doctor first, because the doctor may be totally unaware of the problem. Depending on whether you like your doctor and prefer to continue under his/her care or not, determines the next step.

You have leverage.....be aggressive!

Never-never leave notes to the doctor conce
ing the issue. Never send an email or letter to the doctor's office about the problem. It is amazing and unexplainable how commonly those methods of communication come up "lost" or "deleted" accidentally. Do it all verbally, face to face with the doctor.

Once the doctor knows the situation, choices must be made. An employee doesn't want to lose their job. Usually the doctor can talk to the employee to dig deeper as to why the problem exists, and then manage the problem in a way that everybody wins. But, if you are being too demanding about the conflict, the doctor will end up keeping the employee and you are asked to leave the practice.

Yes, your guessed it, it's easier to get a new patient than to get another employee of the same quality.

To add another component to this situation, the doctor may find that this is just the tip of the iceberg. This employee may have been doing the same to many other patients without the doctor's knowledge---and is terminated.

Be aware that in the doctor's office many things happen which are quietly kept away from the doctor. One employee will not blow the whistle on another employee---it must be world-wide doctrine.

If patients never report a problem directly to the doctor, and just go home each time grumbling about it as they "accidentally" slam the medical office door on the way out, the doctor will never know what goes on.

Advice: Keep changing medical doctors or healthcare providers until you find one you like and feel good around. When mutual admiration exists, you will always receive much better healthcare.